5 Myths About Battery Life – Which Did You Believe?

Battery life has been a key consideration for many of us when buying a smartphone. Unfortunately, battery technology hasn’t advanced as fast as other phone technologies. So we often hear our friends or internet give us plenty of advice about how our battery can last much, much longer.

Let’s face the facts – there are a couple of things that drain our battery most. First, it’s that huge screen that shines like the sun on maximum brightness. Second, it’s our LTE/3G data running in the background, downloading stuff from the Internet. And below are some big myths that are no help to your smartphone battery life.

1. Turning Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth off would prolong your battery life

Hint: Those things make your smartphone smart, if you are that precautious, you’d be better off with a feature phone.

Let’s make it clear – Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth when they are turned on by themselves don’t drain any battery. What drains the battery is apps running in the background using whatever connectivity you have turned on. So instead of shutting down every window your phone has to the outside world, you’d better check your apps.

2. Using task managers and killers will boost your battery life

Hint: Smartphones are smart enough to handle this themselves.

Are you a computer science major specializing on mobile platforms, or an app developer? If the answer is no, you don’t need a task manager, unless you’re trying to impress someone. So just don’t bother, Android, iOS and Windows Phone are all smart enough to handle task management on their own.

3. You need to let the battery discharge completely before recharging your phone

Hint: You don’t, battery memory is a thing of the past.

BUT battery makers still advise you to let your phone discharge once in a month. It probably dies anyway, and chances are that it does it more often, so when that happens just plug it in until it juices up completely. No need to worry and schedule the way you charge your phone.

4. Using automatic brightness would save you a ton of battery life

Hint: It will save you some, but you’d be better off setting your phone to the minimum comfortable brightness for most cases, and manually set it up to brighter when you need it.

Exception: Only if you spend a lot of time outdoors, automatic brightness would actually be a good advice. It uses the phone’s light sensor information to determine whether it’s sunny (brightness needs to go up so you see more) or dark (you don’t need the extra illumination).

5. Using live wallpapers on your Android phone significantly decreases battery life

Hint: It doesn’t.

So you’ve got that gorgeous live wallpaper that no iPhone or Windows Phone have. You’re extremely proud of your Android device. And then you hear that advice that it really isn’t any good because it drains battery life. Truth is that it isn’t. Or to be perfectly exact, it accounts for around 2% of your battery usage. Forget about it and enjoy the view.